


the arena of the unwell

by attheborder



Category: Oh Hello - Kroll & Mulaney
Genre: 1960s, Backstory, Inspired By Withnail & I, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Metafiction, Murder, Mutual Masturbation, Pre-Canon, Sharing a Bed, Yuletide Treat, canon-typical abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-18 11:08:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21510061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: October, 1969. Two codependent, artistically-minded miscreant roommates take a fateful trip to the countryside.
Relationships: George St. Geegland/Gil Faizon
Comments: 19
Kudos: 26
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	the arena of the unwell

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minim Calibre (minim_calibre)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/minim_calibre/gifts).



> thank you so much to my wonderful beta!

> _ROS: Well, really— I mean, people want to be entertained— they don't come expecting sordid and gratuitous filth._  
>  _PLAYER: You're wrong— they do! Murder, seduction and incest— what do you want— jokes?_  
>  _ROS: I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end._  
>  _PLAYER (to GUIL): And you?  
>  _ _GUIL: I'd prefer art to mirror life, if it's all the same to you._  
>  _PLAYER: It's all the same to me, sir._

**October 1969** **  
** **Upper West Side, Manhattan**

Gil opens the fridge, and is blasted in the face by a vast cloud of rotten tuna-scent. He inhales, sampling the bouquet, and then turns around to call back to George in the living room.

“We gotta stock up, man. The tuna’s gone bad!”

George, biting his nails on the sofa, is not paying attention. He’s got a well-worn copy of _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ propped up on his knees and he’s been reading the same page for the last fifteen minutes. He’s dizzy with it. 

“If I told you,” says George, “that the police were going to arrive in an hour and arrest me for murder, what would you do?” His hand itches for a coin to flip, but he’d spent all his change earlier that day buying a single amphetamine pill off a homeless guy on the corner, which he then proceeded to immediately drop down a storm drain.

“But George,” says Gil, closing the fridge and leaning against it, “it’s been _dealt_ with. It was my best performance yet, getting those cops off your back. I even wore a dress!” 

“And I appreciated every second of it, you majestic creature,” says George, “but I am a wreck. I am _paranoid,_ Gil, they’re gonna come for me! ”

“That might be the pot talking,” suggests Gil, “or the Stoppard. Killer combo, marijuana and metafiction. You know what it does to your internal organs. It’s not healthy.” 

George takes off his glasses and cleans them with the edge of his shirt. He puts them back on and squints down at the page to see if the vertigo lessens when he can read the words better. It just makes it worse. _Fuck you, Tom. Why not write a fucking normal play for once?_

He closes his eyes. Opens them again. “Hold on. Did you say we were out of fucking tuna—?” 

***

The Upper West Side isn’t desolate, unless you’re talking spiritually. The people around here don’t _get_ Gil and George, giving them a wide berth as they amble down Broadway, puffing on cigarettes in their ill-fitting clothes and unshaven faces. At this stage of their thirties, they’re no longer mistaken for college students and gamely tolerated; now, their resolute underemployment and artistic tendencies are cause for ostracization. 

George finds a penny on the ground and starts tossing it while Gil whines about wanting to go on vacation; it comes up tails the third time and he tosses it back to the ground, spits on it for good measure. It feels like a bad omen. 

“You were saying something about a vacation?” 

Gil shrugs. “I think we should get away for a bit. Fresh air and stuff.” He gestures at the fallen leaves that line the sidewalk. “It’s a bit brown around here. Smoggy, too. I’m bored.”

“It’ll be brown wherever we go. It’s autumn.” 

“I guess it is. But think about it, will you?” 

“I’ve got a lot on my mind. I’ve been trying to write the first page of my new play for three years now, and I can tell I’m _this_ fucking close. But I’ll try to fit it in.”

They descend into the dimensional portal that is the entrance to Zabar’s. A man behind the counter urgently runs to find his supervisor. “They’re here! Hide the good stuff!” 

***

At some point in between leaving for Zabar’s and returning to re-stock the fridge with tuna, George has lost his copy of _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern_. He pats down all of his pockets, tears the living room apart, even runs down to the phone booth to call Zabar’s and see if he’s left it there. No dice.

“It’s gone!” George cries, collapsing onto the couch. 

“How do you feel?” Gil asks, sympathetically.

“I feel… free!” George breathes, suddenly ecstatic. “Like a weight has been lifted. The cops are _not_ coming, dearest Gil, time and memory are linear once more, I am innocent, I am a genius! It is time to _write!”_

(Gil is glad to hear this. He’s stowed the book carefully inside the toilet tank, where he knows the germ-averse George would never have cause to look.)

“You’re better off without it,” Gil says, coming back into the living room. George has sat down at his typewriter and fed it with a crisp white sheet of paper. “It’s not even that good.”

“You’ve read it?”

“Sure! I’m up for a part, actually. In a repertory production on Long Island.” 

George’s blood runs cold. Gil can’t get a _part._ He certainly can’t get a part in Long fucking Island. 

“...Which part?”

“I’ve gotta be Guildenstern, right?” says Gil. “Because it sounds like my name.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Neither does the play.”

George is about to resist concession on this point, in service of pure contrariness, when there’s a knock at the apartment door. He’s so relaxed owing to the virtuous, convenient disappearance of the book that he doesn’t even stop to consider that it might actually be the police.

Which, unfortunately, it is.

***

“Didn’t I _say_ we should go on vacation? I was right!”

“It’s not a vacation if you’re running away from an active criminal investigation.”

“It _could_ be, if you truly believed...” hums Gil, the optimistic bastard. 

George is throwing clothes pell-mell into his leather travel bag, as Gil hovers interestedly. “You’ve got that cabin in the Catskills, right?” he asks.

“It’s not my cabin. It’s my grandfather’s cabin.”

“You have a grandfather?” 

“Well, not anymore. He offed himself a few years back. Someone found his stash of kid pics, if you know what I mean.”

“You think we could get into the cabin?” 

“I don’t know, Gil…”

“My dad has a time share in a flophouse in Mount Kisco,” offers Gil. 

“Ugh, no.”

“We could visit our Bernard up in Vermont?” 

“Definitely not. I don’t want to get him involved in this shit, he’s too innocent. Would break my goddamn heart to ruin his bright future.” 

“You’re right, you’re right,” agrees Gil. “So— the cabin?” 

“Okay,” says George, “but you’re driving.” He pulls out a large canvas duffel bag from under his bed. “And you’re gonna have to sneak me out inside this, so the cops don’t see.”

***

The cabin is a tiny, decrepit thing in the shadow of a forested hill. It’s pouring rain; they almost get run off the road three times on the way there. Gil is a nausea-inducing driver. But finally the Volvo rumbles to a halt in front, and the two of them stumble out into the mud.

George groans, clutching his head. “Did you remember the drugs? Please tell me you remembered the drugs.”

“Oh,” Gil frowns. “No.”

“Fuck! What the _fuck,_ Gil!” George suddenly has him by the arm, backing him up against the exterior wall of the cabin. “Can’t you remember anything? You piece of shit. You Rosencrantz, you Estragon, you—!”

“I’m sorry I forgot the drugs, George, I’m sorry,” squeaks Gil. “I thought we could just enjoy each other’s company. Pastorally, professionally, platonically speaking, please—”

“No drugs, no book, you’re after a part, the police are after me, and—” George tightens his grip on Gil, looks threateningly around at the darkening landscape— “and we’re in the middle of fucking _nowhere._ You think this’ll end well? ” 

“We’ll manage!” Gil says weakly. He bats puppy-dog eyes up at George. “I did remember the tuna. So we have that.”

“Fine,” spits George, letting go. “But you _owe_ me.” 

“Alright, alright, I owe you!” Gil thinks for a moment. “What do I owe you?”

“I’m gonna use you as my personal footwarmer, just for tonight. It’ll be freezing in there. You can curl up at the foot of the bed and suck my toes until I fall asleep.”

***

The good news is that the police haven’t pursued them. Knowing what George knows about the increasing crime rate of their home city, he’s confident a week of laying low will be all the cops need to forget about Pamela.

The bad news is that in the decade since George last spent any time here, a commune has sprung up nearby, and they’ve been using the abandoned cabin to store packaging material for their marijuana distribution operation. Gil and George have to spend the next day clearing out boxes and bags to make the place livable. 

Afterwards, George tries to get some writing done, but he’s highly distracted by the idea of acquiring some pot. Maybe the hippies even have a spare Stoppard or two. He knows he’s better off without either of these things, but he’s beyond caring. He needs his fix. 

So they set off, wandering across misty fields in search of pot and/or paratext. It’s very picturesque, but George is freezing his ass off. He winds his scarf tighter around his face, which only makes his glasses fog up, turning Gil beside him into a blurry-edged ghost. 

“I really think I can get that part,” muses Gil. 

“You probably won’t.”

“Do I detect a hint of _jealousy_ in your tone, George?” 

George blusters, “Why would I be jealous of you? You can’t get laid. You can barely even get it up.”

“But I’m beautiful, baby!” Gil crows. 

“Yeah, whatever,” says George, which Gil takes as a compliment. 

Their path over the damp farmland is aimless. “Where are we going?” asks Gil. “We are entitled to some direction.” 

“That’s Guildenstern’s line,” says George, stumbling slightly as the minuscule hit of metafiction sizzles his synapses. “Mm. Hey, do you know any more of it?” 

“Never mind, look, that must be it!” Gil points with a stubby finger over the rise. The rickety structures of the commune are spread out below, windows glowing through the afternoon Upstate gloom. 

“Here’s how we’re gonna do this,” George says, shifting into scheme mode. “We walk up in there, I tell them we’re a couple of poor homosexual farmers from down the country lane and— and our tractor broke down, and we need some, uh, tractor… grease…. And pot. Lots of pot. Or LSD. Really, whatever they have, we’ll take.” 

“Why do we need to be homosexual farmers?” asks Gil. “Can’t we just be regular farmers?” 

“Shut up, it’s part of the scam! Now come on, let’s get into character.” He holds out his hand, and Gil takes it. 

***

An hour later, they're being kicked to the curb. 

“And _stay out,_ you perverts!” calls the furious, long-haired hippie girl who’d had the rotten luck of being singled out for George’s affections (if such a term could be used). 

As the door slams, Gil whines to George, “We said we weren’t from Manhattan! Why didn’t they believe us?”

“It’s ridiculous,” agrees George. “These places are supposed to be open minded.” 

“George, you weren’t staying in character at all,” frowns Gil. “You were all over that _girl._ You weren’t _committing_.” 

“What? You didn’t even want to do the gay farmer thing in the first place! And once we were _in,_ I just didn’t think it was—” 

“This is why you’re never gonna get anywhere with your play. You just don’t know how to make a choice and stick with it.” 

“You take that back! I’m an _artist,_ I’m gonna be a _star_ —” And George, infuriated, lunges forward, pushing Gil backwards, but Gil’s hands fly to George’s scarf and he drags him down as well. 

They tussle in the reeking mud, screaming obscenities, until George gets the upper hand, one broad hand throttling Gil’s neck and the other pinning down his wrist. Gil manages to wheeze something urgently up at George, which George assumes is another loaded insult. 

“The fuck did you say to me!”

“I stole— their drugs—” croaks Gil, hand scrabbling uselessly at his jacket pocket.

“Oh, shit,” George says, springing away from Gil, who heaves great shaking breaths of cold air. “Really?”

“Yeah— look,” he says shakily, and draws out a bulging bag of pills and pot from inside his shabby coat. “When you had your hands on her ass, I— I— grabbed this—” 

George snatches the bag from Gil, holds it up in the dying, glassy evening light. “Gil, you’re a fuckin’ genius. Greatest spy to ever live, my God, if Kissinger ever got his hands on you—” 

“What’s that about kissing?” says Gil woozily, and slumps away in a dead faint. 

***

They run through the pilfered substances by the following day, and melancholy descends on the cabin. Without the roar of the avenues and the chug of the pipes and the shouts from all corners that surround their city abode, George can only hear the echoes of Gil’s lead-footed stomps around the cabin, his tuneless humming, his mumbles to himself in different silly voices. 

George’s typing paper is as fallow as the fields. He fears a telegram arriving, bearing news of Gil’s casting in that wretched Long Island production; he fears the return of the hippie girl armed with a bread knife and a thirst for revenge; but most vitally he fears that he’ll never write a single word worth anything in his entire life. 

He wants his play to excite people. Thrill them, shock them. He wants it to be vast and complicated and original. But how can he manage to produce something exciting from this state of interminable rural despondency? 

George considers his options. He could murder Gil, get a little first-hand inspiration. It’d be easy enough to hide the body, out here in Buttfuckistan. 

But if he murdered Gil, Gil wouldn’t be around anymore. Simple cause and effect. Plus, his death probably wouldn’t be convincing enough to inspire anything in George. _The mechanics of cheap melodrama._ No, the demise of a weak man like that, an _actor,_ of all people, could not be fuel for any sort of honest fire. He is much more useful alive.

Regardless, there is a need to get the blood pumping. He expresses as much to Gil. 

“I saw a big cow outside,” says Gil. “We could play toreadors. Olé, et cetera.”

“Animals are your area, not mine. You wanna go get gored, be my guest.”

Gil thinks. “We could jerk off?”

This seems to be workable. George arranges himself in one of the deflated armchairs in the sitting room, with Gil sprawling on the moldering sofa opposite, and they get their cocks out and get to work. Ever since he first saw Gil naked at the pool of the 23rd Street YMCA, where nude swimming was mandatory, George has prided himself in the knowledge that he’s bigger than Gil, more pleasingly shaped, that if they ever had a contest judged by a third party, George’s dick would win on aesthetics alone. 

George, like he has done so often these past few weeks, brings himself to the edge by imagining the sound Pamela’s body made as it hit the bottom of the staircase. 

He finishes slightly before Gil, and when he opens his eyes to reach for the Kleenex, it’s to the sight of Gil’s green eyes staring his way, intense and focused, for just a moment before they shudder closed as he comes. 

George isn’t quite sure whether he imagined that. Was Gil really looking at him the whole time? Should he even care, if he was? That fucking creep. The fucking nerve.

He sits down at his typewriter a while later, but nothing seems willing to emerge except diaristic, autobiographical nonsense. Pure trash. He crumples up the page and starts again.

***

The night is freezing, and George is not sleeping. He is thinking about bodies. Warm bodies, cold bodies, dead bodies, bodies of work, celestial bodies, antibodies. 

When the door creaks open to reveal Gil, silhouetted in lamplight, George is torn between annoyance and relief.

“I heard a noise outside,” Gil says quietly. “I’m scared.”

“It’s probably one of your raccoon exes, come to beg for cash. Trash, I mean. Whatever the fuck they use as currency. Go back to bed.” 

A pause. “Can I sleep here?” 

“Yeah. Sure, man.” 

George is cold, is the thing, and Gil has always run hot, the fevered little freak, so when he climbs into bed next to George and presses himself close, George tells himself it’s mere convenience, mere physics— all that heat has to go somewhere, and why not right to him? 

Gil’s asleep within seconds, snoring up a goddamn storm. He sounds like a farm animal, asthmatic, phlegmatic, impossibly loud. 

George is still wide awake. He’s thinking now about how even if Gil doesn’t get this part, there’ll inevitably be more auditions, more possibilities for him to break free from his stable orbit around George. 

George worries, and worries, and worries. 

And then, all of a sudden— he’s got it.

If good old T-Stopps can stir the pot, mash up old shit with the philosophical products of his own fertile mind and have people going crazy for it, why can’t George? What’s most comfortable and marketable is what people know already, because people are fucking stupid. Maybe originality is for pussies. Maybe the solution to his own creative block and Gil’s threat of departure is one and the same.

“Eureka!” he says, sitting up in bed. 

“What is it, George?” Gil says blearily, blinking awake. His dark hair is sticking up in an absurd way, which would be ripe for mockery, except George is currently distracted by the thrill of his own epiphany. 

“Get this. Get this, Gil— listen— we do _Waiting for Godot,_ but I’ll have Godot show up like three minutes in, and then we’ll prank him with too much tuna—” 

“What are you talking about?” groans Gil.

George twists around in bed and gets his hands on Gil’s shoulders, shaking him awake. 

“You and me. I’ll adapt plays with parts for both of us. Make them interesting. Better. More commercially appealing. And you won’t need to go out for auditions anymore, I’ll put you in them all. I can stop slaving away at the first page of some full-cast epic, and just write stuff for us to put on. Together.”

“Wow, George. You’d really do that? For me?”

“Not _for_ you, idiot,” George says automatically. “I— just think it’d be the best way to advance my career.”

Gil sighs and gazes heavenwards. “Well, it’s a wonderful concept. We’ve got good chemistry. We might make it all the way to Br’dway.”

George relaxes back into his pillow. “I might. I don’t know about you,” he says shortly. _Gotta keep him on his toes._

But it’s a nice thought all the same. 

***

Eventually, they get chased out of the cabin by a mob of angry hippies. George barely escapes with his typewriter, only narrowly avoiding the swipe of the long-haired girl’s bread knife, and Gil receives a nasty black eye from a guy in a knit poncho.

After a hectic drive, they stumble back into their Upper West Side apartment, where everything is covered in a fine layer of dust. 

“Hey, George?” says Gil, collapsing on the sofa on the living room.

“Yeah, Gil?”

“Let’s never leave Manhattan again.”

“Fine by me,” George says. “That’s just fine by me.”

  
  


**

**Author's Note:**

> companion story featuring withnail & marwood’s bonkers west end production circa 2019 available upon request (…. i am only slightly kidding.)
> 
> and okay yes i will acknowledge that in the show they say their version of true west (1980) was the first play they ever put on together, BUT sometimes you gotta play fast and loose with an already utterly nonsensical canon in order to make your pretentious metaphors really hit home!!!!


End file.
